Youtube General thread (formerly Youtube Censorship discussion thread)

[MrJokerRager]

YouTube has been getting worse and worse each year ever since the Viacom lawsuit. It's amazing how ad filled and overly censored that site has become, literally worse than TV now

YouTube is also cucking to Jew York over gun content as well.

 

[Mushroom King]

Gentlemen.

It's 2024 and we are experiencing late stage YouTube. The economical situation of the United States and the world at large is forcing the largest companies to make sudden and drastic decisions to try and keep their income higher than their operating expenses, whereas in the past it seemed even the largest companies were happy to operate at a loss or with no profit for years. YouTube in particular had been terminally unprofitable for years, and it seems that pajeet CEOs are calling it: make some fucking money.

YouTube is experimenting with a Final Solution to the Adblocker problem, similar to Twitch, where they inject ads directly into the bitstreams that make up a video, so that an ad is technologically indistinguishable from the content you've requested.

I believe, therefore, that I should remind people that the only thing they truly have is whatever they personally own. In this context, I am referring to downloading copies of videos. I wrote a guide to this here:

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/archival-tools.6561/

For many of you, YouTube will be a place where you've saved videos for over a decade. It's time to save what you want off the platform before they start doing more dumb shit. Whatever you want to keep forever on YouTube should be downloaded as soon as possible.

Are there any lolcow channels I should be archiving?

Mark my words, hear me clearly, include me in the screenshot. The femtosecond that they roll this out, I will begin a channel named Gone But Not Forgotten Loved Ones. And when YouTube forces a 120 second advertisement for hot dogs over a 80 year old boomer dying, the normie army will tear it to pieces.

Sponsored by Burger King. Don't grieve alone, Have a Whopper.

 

[Chimplord1997]

You can input cookies, but I never explored this option much.

I'll add to the conversation by recommending a GUI frontend for yt-dlp I've been using for a while (Stacher). Learnt about it on KF from an IT thread a while ago. It's been serving me well, can automate many functions that'd otherwise require constant manual writing and generally is just easy to use.

AAAAAAAH Thank you for sharing this, this is making my archival much more streamlined!

 

[Pokemanifsmokeweed]

Are there any lolcow channels I should be archiving?

Might as well archive the whole Rage Against The Washing Machine series then, aka a series that hilariously documents all of the retarded antics of Tommy Tooter.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBjZ_L4_zKa6HEH2N4HcKx9sT4fHzkFUs&si=_PRv4qNeKNOa2um_

 

[Brabbit Narp]

Regarding the dynamic ad insertion stuff, would there be other applications that would rise in response similar to Sponsorblock where video creators could instead submit their "original" video content to a database, and said addon could check against the video in a given user's stream to strip out the ad? I am guessing this would almost certainly be against YouTube's ToS, but I figure something like that would come up in the short term.

 

[Pokemanifsmokeweed]

Regarding the dynamic ad insertion stuff, would there be other applications that would rise in response similar to Sponsorblock where video creators could instead submit their "original" video content to a database, and said addon could check against the video in a given user's stream to strip out the ad? I am guessing this would almost certainly be against YouTube's ToS, but I figure something like that would come up in the short term.

This is why we need alternative video uploading platforms like Rumble tbh

 

[retard safari]

Imagine advertising on youtube and conditioning your consumers to associate your product with the unpleasant sensation of having to skip an ad. lol

This is exactly what I think every time an ad comes up.
Also, you'd think they'd realize that most people (I hope) don't even look at or listen to the ad, just the skip button, waiting for it to unlock, and therefore often have no idea what the ad is actually for, wasting their own time and money.
If I were an Ad Man I would instead just make a super short subliminal thing that lasts 5 seconds and just says the name of the product. Some of them have started to do this, but I've only seen a few.
Most are still using TV style commercials
So are they retarded, stubborn, or what? I don't get it.

I'm sure soon enough none of us will even be able to dream peacefully anymore because some soytech San Fran Satan tech company will make it possible to beam ads directly into your nervous system.

 

[T-21]

A reminder that YouTube made up to 30 billions of profits last year, yet somehow the pajeet CEO still craves for more by following Twitch's ads injection method.

Actual scum of the earth. Total Pajeet Death.

 

[i440BX]

The command:

Replace (Archive Path) as stated above, and (Channel URL) with the URL of the channel you want to download (you will need to run a seperate download operation for their main videos page, shorts page, and Live page).

Oh, I wish I could see this command before I downloaded all the videos.
Is it possible to download the chapters/video desctiption without redownloading the videos?
I already downloaded subtitles.

 

[i440BX]

A reminder that YouTube made up to 30 billions of profits last year, yet somehow the pajeet CEO still craves for more by following Twitch's ads injection method.

Actual scum of the earth. Total Pajeet Death.

The engineer responsible for making Google search worse for the sake of money was also Indian, worked at Yahoo and destroyed that previous company. How he got that job, I don't know.

 

[crowabunga]

This will never happen but imagine if YouTube charged 1 cent for every ~10 minutes of video uploaded. And didn't adjust the fee downward for foreign currencies.

Cheap enough that any serious wannabe video makers can fund a week of uploads with pocket change, but discourages streaming, spam, and 3rd world shenanigans.

 

[Merton J. Dingle]

Are there any lolcow channels I should be archiving?

Any of the archives of Deagle Nation, Mobility Mary, and Fedsmoker.

 

[whatever I feel like]

This is exactly what I think every time an ad comes up.
Also, you'd think they'd realize that most people (I hope) don't even look at or listen to the ad, just the skip button, waiting for it to unlock, and therefore often have no idea what the ad is actually for, wasting their own time and money.
If I were an Ad Man I would instead just make a super short subliminal thing that lasts 5 seconds and just says the name of the product. Some of them have started to do this, but I've only seen a few.
Most are still using TV style commercials
So are they retarded, stubborn, or what? I don't get it.

I'm sure soon enough none of us will even be able to dream peacefully anymore because some soytech San Fran Satan tech company will make it possible to beam ads directly into your nervous system.

I think its nuts that literally everyone doesn't start their ads by immediately saying the company or product name. It doesn't even have to be obvious, "The Honda Accord was rated...," "Ca-ca-carne tacos available for a limi....", "Grainger, why yes we do have 17/32 inch rotating cal...." So many ads don't even say what they're for before their five se onds are up.

Or they're like Liberty Mutual and make me actively despise the product.

 

[TheHarbinger]

I think its nuts that literally everyone doesn't start their ads by immediately saying the company or product name.

Not every advertisement is about the product. Sometimes it is about social conditioning. Hence why every ad has a race mixed couple. And some advertisements, especially internet advertisements, are things like a virus/scam site disguised as a clickbait news article or a fake raffle prize. Extremely loud commercials or seizure inducing flashing banners are indicators that selling a product is secondary to some other agenda.

 

[TrainWreckWatcher]

IF they can beat twitch ads they can beat youtube ads.
It'll be another battle where it ends up costing them more money to constantly update everything than the people doing it for free because they fucking hate youtube ads.
It'll suck for a month or two most likely as you have to update twice every day. But eventually youtube will be brown beaten down like a bitch again because it costs too much to keep up with people doing it for free who hate their fucking guts.
If anything it may end up making twitch injected ads even more avoidable in the long run which is a win.

 

[Day of the Cope]

I am so fucking tired of it all. All the "technological improvements" over the past 10 years has been dedicated to either showing you ads or trying to harvest your data (to show you even more ads).

 

[The Lawgiver]

Extremely loud commercials or seizure inducing flashing banners are indicators that selling a product is secondary to some other agenda.

it's never stopped being funny to me how when youtube animators get a certain level of popular they have to start putting "LOUD SOUNDS/FLASHING LIGHTS" in their video titles so their vids don't get flagged by yt's algorithm but advertisers can just fucking rape your eyes and ears unchecked.

I am so fucking tired of it all. All the "technological improvements" over the past 10 years has been dedicated to either showing you ads or trying to harvest your data (to show you even more ads).

Hi fi rush, that really popular beat em up that came out recently from the studio microsoft somehow paradoxically decided to nuke into oblivion before the sequel was made's main villain plot was literally a joke about that. Kinda triggers the conspiracy theorist in me.

 

[TrainWreckWatcher]

This is exactly what I think every time an ad comes up.
Also, you'd think they'd realize that most people (I hope) don't even look at or listen to the ad, just the skip button, waiting for it to unlock, and therefore often have no idea what the ad is actually for, wasting their own time and money.

I have some wonderful horror news to share with you.
"Your web camera is not turned on you cannot continue unless we know you're watching the ad,"

Here's a patent by sony for smart TVs, that they could probably do with phones easily too.

They want you to get up and chant the product name to continue your show. BUILT into the TVs you're buying.
There are tons of fresh hells coming your way.

 

[Black Yoshi]

Gentlemen.

It's 2024 and we are experiencing late stage YouTube.

Late stage Youtube was the 1st apocalypse of 2017. This is zombie Youtube.

 

[Faceless Whore]

How to archive YouTube videos

At this point here's my recommendation:

1. Use PreserveTube.com

https://preservetube.com/

It's free, run by a Kiwi, does not use space on your computer/device, and can save single videos, playlists, and entire channels. And not only will it be saved for you but for everyone else as well.

Go there ASAP and submit your favorites, especially any lolcow channels that need preserving.




2. Use websites and tools to download to your own computer/device

If you have the storage space, you can download videos yourself.

If you're tech savvy:

1. yt-dlp (youtube-dl is obsolete and no longer maintained, don't use it)
2. Tube Archivist
3. metube

If you're tech retarded:

1. Google "download YouTube video" and use a website downloader. There's lots of them. This is fine for individual videos, but if you have a ton or a playlist/channel it'll be inconvenient, so use another method.
2. Use the download option on public Invidious servers. SOME servers enable downloads, you will have to check servers to find them. Keep in mind random servers may have slow or unreliable connections.
   1. Pay attention and make sure you download one of the full video options (they should be first on the list) and not an audio-only or video-only option. Audio-only is obviously fine for music/podcasts (use an audio/mp4 option, bigger @ number = better audio quality). If you need another resolution that isn't available you'll have to use a different method (the GUI programs below might work), because these days YouTube separates audio and video into different files and combines them when you watch, and Invidious is too retarded to combine them for you.
3. Use a GUI program. These are best for lots of videos/playlists/channels.
   1. Tartube (get the "and FFmpeg installer" version, you may need it)
   2. Stacher
   3. 4k Download
   4. Google "yt-dlp gui" and see what comes up.

Advice for download settings:

1. If it asks for a format select mp4, that is the most common format used.
2. If it lets you select a resolution (480p, 720p, 1080p, etc.) using a smaller resolution will save space.
   1. I recommend 480p for most content, unless the video contains content like text, on-screen chat in livestreams etc that can't be read. View the video after downloading to see if any text is readable, and if not redownload at a higher resolution.
   2. 720p may be better for livestreams if you want to preserve on-screen chat.
   3. 1080p or above may be best for some cow content for examining background details (inspecting the items in a filthy house, inspecting suspicious shadows that could suggest another person is present, things like that).
   4. It may be worthwhile to preserve cow content at 1080p or above just for the sake of having highest quality, but this will take a lot of space and may not be worthwhile unless you're going to share it.

3. Use Ghostarchive.org

Ghostarchive, a website archive

ghostarchive.org

This archiver can sometimes save videos from YouTube pages, not just the page itself.
I don't know what quality it saves at however. There may also be limits on the size/length of videos that can be saved.

Best for individual videos you want preserved, like cow videos.

---

Q&A

1. I'll just use Invidious/FreeTube/Piped/NewPipe/SponserBlock/uBlock/YouTube alternative XYZ


The reason this is news worthy of a Feature on the Farms front page is because all of these might not be able to stop it. If this was something adblockers/alternatives could prevent nobody would give a shit and it wouldn't be newsworthy.

>Well I haven't seen any ads.
This is still being rolled out, just because you haven't seen any yet doesn't mean you won't see them eventually if Google goes forward with it.

>We can just mark where ads appear and remove them like SponserBlock
Ads can be inserted in random places each time the video is viewed so this won't work. Ads will also be of different lengths, so even if an ad position is marked it may be a different length each time.

If you don't trust/believe me take it from slobbermutt:

The ad blocks will not be consistent or consistent times.

I think the people discussing adblockers don't seem to understand that no conventional adblocker will be able to adequately bypass ads once this change is implemented. As far as your computer is able to discern, the content you are watching is indistinguishable from the rest of the video. It is effectively lying to your computer as to what is ad and what is not ad. You will not be able to block it. Even if you had AI that could detect the interruption for you, the best it will be able to do is simply mute and black out until the ad has finished playing.

And really, if they're that dedicated, more sophisticated tools could be detected. Even if it were something really magic like being able to download the next sequence of the video from a remote server and play it instead, YouTube would be able to tell that your player is now acting as if the ad never played, and it could break itself.

2. This will introduce security risks

Performing on the fly code injections on youtube videos seems like a real good way for some advertisers to hack peoples devices

How long until someone discovers a security risk in how youtube bakes ads into the video? Prepare for Video SQL injection.

There seems to be some confusion because we're using the term "inject" to describe this, but this is not code injection. YouTube is inserting videos into YouTube videos, not code or the kinds of ads on the sides of pages.

It's the equivalent of opening the videos in a video editor and inserting the ad video clip in the middle. The entire thing is still just a video, but with video ads inserted. But instead of doing it by hand in a video editor, Google is automating it on the fly with a program when each person watches a video.

Or to put it another way, it's like ads on cable TV. They're video ads edited into the middle of videos the way television ads were edited into cable TV shows.
(The way ads worked previously on YouTube is they were not part of the video itself, they were entirely separate, and YouTube would pause the video you were watching and show them "on top" of the video. Adblockers worked by identifying these separate files and preventing them from being downloaded or displayed.)


3. But inserting ads requires encoding/is computationally difficult/etc.

Videos are a series of data chunks. Video data can be inserted between these chunks with almost no effort at all. It does not require re-encoding.


4. Just use tools to identify the ads in video and remove them.

MythTV developed a way of skipping TV ads ages ago. Hopefully the better youtube channels will start putting a logo in the corner to make this easy.

https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Commercial_detection

Has anyone posted screenshots of what the embedded ads actually look like? I wonder how hard it would be to train something like CLIP to recognize ad frames and block them. Or maybe not even CLIP, maybe just a more low-tech image recognition thing.

and filter out any parts which deviate from that data, thereby negating this newest YouTube faggotry?

This is a possibility, but the problem is whether such a tool can reliably differentiate between a video's content and ad content. Given how varied video content can be there's no guarantee this can be done reliably and may generate false positives.


5. So we're fucked?

Never underestimate the power of autism to overcome a problem like this, but don't put absolute faith in it being solved either.